1. Field of the Invention
The present system relates to content management technologies and, more particularly, technologies that integrate with controlling applications to provide content presentation and other content management functionality in the context of the user experience within the controlling application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Physical documents as well as electronic documents and other content objects such as email, audio, video, etc., that themselves serve as business records or that relate to other business records may be located throughout an organization. Such items may be located in boxes, filing cabinets, email inboxes, file systems, databases, and in other storage repositories. Such items often drive business processes and are critical not only to the value propositions of an organization, but also to its legal and regulatory compliance and internal policy compliance and governance requirements. The physical nature of documents causes a wide variety of issues for organizations that slow down processes because the documents cannot be located in more than one place at one time, high volumes are difficult to manage, process and store, they are susceptible to environmental damage, and often need to be viewed by more than one person at one time. Even electronic documents and other content objects, if not properly managed, can present the same logistical issues as physical documents. One such example is the difficulty in determining whether or not an electronic file is the original. This is often encountered when many recipients receive the same email with an attachment, or when the same file is stored multiple times on a file system under different directories with different names. Considered collectively, these issues compel organizations to implement document management and enterprise content management (ECM) systems that attempt to solve these and other core issues.
ECM systems help users capture, manage, access, view, secure, collaborate on, store and dispose of content objects relating to business records. ECM features and functions are designed to facilitate fast and efficient processing of a content object, to help identify the actual business records, and to access and store the content objects until their retention time has lapsed.
An ECM system may be considered as a stand-alone application or as a companion to an underlying business system in areas such as payment processing, billing systems, security, service management, sales, resource planning, human resource management, customer relationship management, manufacturing, forms automation, or business intelligence. When an ECM system is operable as a companion to an underlying business system, then the underlying business system may be considered a ‘controlling’ application in the sense that the underlying business system in some way directs or ‘controls’ the actions, behaviors, and display of the ECM system's functionality in a manner that is intended to enhance or improve the use of the underlying business system.
For example, traditional ECM systems address content management needs by inducting both the content object and the business system's data into the ECM system's own storage repository, thereby duplicating the business system's data. The result is an ECM system that is largely disconnected from the business system and that requires frequent data synchronization of, and batch data processing between, the ECM system and the business system. Careful planning and constant management is needed to minimize mistakes caused by incorrect or untimely data synchronization of the ECM system and the business system. This disconnected environment requires extra labor resources to perform manual processes to review synchronization log files, determine the occurrence of both success and failure events, and resolve errors associated with failure events.
A more recent approach of some ECM systems has been to embed links and buttons into a business system and to display a list of content objects when the button is clicked. In a simple approach, clicking the button or link will launch a user interface to show all content objects available. In a more sophisticated approach, clicking the button or link will show a limited set of content objects directly related to the record displayed on the screen. Both of these methods produce satisfactory results for users searching for content objects in business environments with lower volumes and/or lower complexity. As volume and/or complexity increases, certain requirements related to security, user training costs, and the ability to show various interrelationships among content objects and records in other business systems, lead organizations to seek a more flexible and sophisticated approach.